The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers.

Okay, it’s not exactly the Camp David Summit that took place in 2000 between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but sometimes the littlest gestures can go a long way.

A couple of days ago, upon hearing that Microsoft had officially joined Twitter, the official Linux account sent out a tweet welcoming them. “Welcome to Twitter, @Microsoft!,” they said. The tweet sat unanswered for over a day, and it seemed like Microsoft may never answer. But about a few hours ago, they did. “@Linux thanks, nice to be here,” they replied.

On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

If anyone in the world can make antitrust law interesting, it’s Reback.

Much of the hour plus conversation focused on the history of antitrust law and Reback’s experience in big antitrust cases from his new book, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). But we also spoke about current events and his concerns that lax antitrust enforcement has led to less competition today in tech than is optimal.

We spent a lot of time on Google. His chief concern is Google Books (jump to the 30 minute mark), and he argues that a DOJ investigation is appropriate. I’m more concerned with competition in search and search marketing, and we spoke about this as well.

The video is below (plus a way to get his new book for free):

It’s Twitter day at Microsoft, apparently. Not only did the software giant announce that it would start adding tweets to its Bing search results, the company actually started officially using Twitter today.

To be clear, Microsoft had a rather large presence on Twitter before through its various departments/products/services, but now it’s using the main /microsoft account to tweet. The account is being run by its corporate communications team, consisting of four people. So far there have been only 2 tweets and the account only has about 1,000 people following it. That should change, fast.

It may sound kind of silly, but when I talk to people outside of the tech world about Bing, the first thing brought up is usually how they like the pictures. And now Microsoft has created a contest on Facebook to let one user get their own picture featured on Bing.

The Bing Summer Travel Photo Contest is asking Facebook users to submit their best summer vacation photos. The community will then vote on them, and the winner will get its day in the sun, so to speak, on Monday, August 3 — appearing to the millions who visit Bing on that day.

Naturally, there are some rules for these photos as Microsoft probably doesn’t want kickass keg party pictures on the Bing homepage. Obviously, no alcohol, smoking, guns, violence or nudity will be allowed. But Microsoft also doesn’t want any pictures with recognizable people or any third party trademarked images, so they don’t get sued.

Brand loyalty is a powerful thing, especially when it comes to technology. Consider the battle brewing now between Google and Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Even if Bing proves to be just as good as Google, it might not matter because of the strength of Google’s brand. An independent usability and consumer preference study, which we’ve obtained and embedded below, suggests as much. It was conducted by the Catalyst Group, a usability research and design firm located in New York City.

The study was an intense focus group in which 12 subjects were monitored with eye-tracking cameras as they conducted searches. Afterward, they were interviewed and completed a survey. Prior to the test, all the subjects used Google as their main search engine. Following the test, 4 out of the 12, or one third, said that overall they preferred Bing. The other 8 said that they preferred Google because they were already familiar with it, used other Google products, or that Bing’s improvements are simply not enough to make them switch.

While it is pretty much the standard email client, Microsoft Outlook has long had problems rendering HTML correctly in emails. And the latest version, Outlook 2010, due sometime in the next several months, doesn’t look like it’s going to be any better — and it actually may be worse. And a lot of users aren’t happy about it at all.

A group of people apparently felt strongly enough to create a site called Outlook’s broken — Let’s fix it. The site is simple, it’s a constantly updating stream of users tweeting out their desire for Microsoft to fix this problem with Outlook. Right now, it’s just about 6,000 tweets, but it’s growing about a tweet every second (even at this hour of the night here in the U.S.). When a new tweet comes in, that user’s icon appears on the screen next to hundreds of other icons that had previously tweeted about it. And as the stream updates, random tweets about fixing Outlook are flashed on the screen.

Acquiring Yahoo, one employee at a time: Microsoft has recruited Kevin Timmons, former lead of Yahoo’s data center team, to head up its Data Center Services organization. Timmons was once director of Operations at GeoCities and worked his way up to VP of Operations at Yahoo, where he led the build-out of the company’s data centers and infrastructure.

This move comes shortly after Microsoft data center exec Michael Manos left Redmond to fill a new position at Digital Realty Trust, and only two months after the company hired another Yahoo executive - Dayne Sampson - for a key position at Microsoft Global Foundation Services (which Data Center Services is a part of).

In honor of the iPhone 3G S launch today, I thought I’d point out a humorous little deal circulating around the web. Apparently, you can use Microsoft’s Cashback program that it runs through its search engine (and now through Bing), to get a healthy 35% discount off of the device.

Depending on your eligibility for AT&T’s subsidy (more on that here), that means you can get an iPhone 3G S 16 GB for $129.35, the 32 GB version for $194.35. Or, perhaps even better, an 8 GB iPhone 3G for $64.90. Yes, you can get a new iPhone for $65 — thanks to Microsoft. Crazy.

Here’s is a full rundown of how to make it happen:

Yesterday, we poked fun at Microsoft’s tacky $10,000 online treasure hunt to get people to use IE8, at the domain TenGrandIsBuriedHere.com. We were hardly the only ones. Today, a developer at Mozilla, makers of IE rival Firefox, weighed in with his own way of mocking Microsoft: TenGrandIsBuriedThere.com.

The site is simply a Google Map zoomed out to a certain point. If you zoom in enough, you’ll find a surprise. The developer took exception to Microsoft calling Firefox “old” on its site. That is a bit odd since IE is much older than Firefox.

My esteemed colleague MG Siegler just posted about an admittedly quite in-your-face campaign from Microsoft down under, criticizing Redmond for a ‘pathetic’ attempt at trying to make people switch from using whatever browser other than IE they’re using at the moment in exchange for a chance to win $10,000. I don’t necessarily disagree - it’s fair to say there are far better ways to market browsers than covert bribery and making the competition look like bad eggs - but it doesn’t really surprise me and it won’t work anyway.

But do the browser wars us geeks follow so closely matter to John Doe at all?

Here’s a video some NY-based Google employees put up on YouTube a while ago, titled ‘What is a browser?’:

I love the range of Microsoft’s campaigns to get people to use Internet Explorer 8. They spread from offering to feed the homeless if you download it, to offering you the chance at $10,000 dollars. It’s quite impressive, really.

I think we all know my feelings about Microsoft using charity in a misleading way to drive IE8 downloads, but this latest promotion is just kind of pathetic. Microsoft has a campaign in Australia to give away $10,000 that it has buried “somewhere on the Internet.” But the catch is that in order to find this money, you need to be using IE8. Apparently, if you stumble upon the site where Microsoft placed it using that browser, you’ll get some sort of notification and the money is yours.

Yesterday, we wrote about Microsoft’s pledge to feed the hungry if you download their web browser. That campaign is misleading, and it really shows when you compare it to another campaign of a similar nature.

Today, while at Facebook’s new headquarters in Palo Alto, we noticed that it too is involved in a campaign to end hunger. But rather than pledging to feed hungry people only if you download something from Facebook, the company is doing it on the down-low, asking its employees to help out, in its own cafeteria.

So, maybe you heard about Microsoft’s newest promotion to get people to use one of its products. If you download Internet Explorer 8 through this site, Microsoft promises to donate 8 meals per download to a group called Feeding America, which wants to end hunger in this country. Sounds great, right? Read the fine print.

Only complete downloads of Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 through browserforthebetter.com from June 8, 2009 through August 8, 2009 qualify for the charitable donation to Feeding America®. Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000. Meals are used for illustrative purposes only. Meal conversion is effective until June 30th, 2010.

In case you missed it, let me highlight the hilarious part: $1.15 per download. For 8 meals. Let’s do the math.

The web is currently ablaze with headlines that IE8 will not be included in the European release of Windows this fall. In fact, no browser at all is going to be included with the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system. No, Hell has not frozen over — the news is the result of Microsoft’s longstanding (and very costly) antitrust issues with the European Commission. And it has everyone, from the regulators to consumers to IE competitors, very upset. Fortunately, it seems like this is much ado about nothing.

The way some people are portraying it, it’s as if millions of computer users are suddenly going to be left Internet-less, isolated on their home PCs without any hope of ever reaching the web beyond. But an important statistic that some major news outlets are failing to highlight (though most others are pointing out) is that the vast majority of people won’t notice the change at all. That’s because PC makers — your Dells, HPs, etc. — will be able to install IE8 before their computers ever reach the consumer. And you can be sure that for nearly all of computers they sell, they’re going to do just that.

Google’s small but growing enterprise app business is now going for Microsoft’s jugular. At a press conference today (see Mike’s real-time notes), Google announced a new plug-in that will sync Google’s enterprise versions of Gmail, contacts, and calendar with Microsoft’s Outlook. In the enterprise, Outlook is still king and not everyone is ready to switch just yet to browser-based email, calendars and contact management.

Internet audience measurement company comScore has released a preliminary study of the performance of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, during the first week of its public launch. The study confirms earlier reports that Bing had a very good start, even overtaking Yahoo as the No. 2 search engine at some point according to web analytics firm StatCounter (although that apparently lasted only a day).

According to comScore, Microsoft Sites increased its average daily penetration among searchers in the United States from 13.8% during the period of May 26-30 to 15.5% during the period of June 2-6, 2009, an indication that the search engine is reaching more people than before. Microsoft’s share of search engine results pages (SERPs) in the U.S., increased from 9.1% to 11.1% during the same time frame.

Dublin-based InishTech debuts today as a new startup relaunching Microsoft Software Licensing and Protection (SLP) Services, a business unit Redmond booted back in October 2007 following its acquisition of the company Secured Dimensions in January of the same year. At the end of September 2008, Microsoft stopped accepting new SLPS customers, which we got confirmation of when we researched and reported the quiet shut-down.

Microsoft was kind enough to send us a few boxes of Bing stickers (we requested them). We don’t have enough surface area on our laptops, walls, floors, dogs, etc. to use them all, so if you want a couple, they’re all yours. Just send us a self addressed stamped envelope and we’ll put a few in the mail back to you.

Send those envelopes to TechCrunch, PO Box 638, Menlo Park, CA 94026.

If you want, send us one of your startup stickers to that address, to. We’ll force the interns to put them on their laptops and stand in front of the CrunchCam with it.

Here’s one on the back of the last generation CrunchPad prototype:

As the phones in our pockets become our second computers, it will become increasingly important to sync data between the two. Not just emails, but contacts, calendars, photos, music, apps, browser bookmarks, files, and more. Nearly every Web phone out there comes with at least some sort of rudimentary syncing app. Apple has MobileMe, Nokia has Ovi, Palm has Synergy, Blackberry has Internet Services, and Microsoft has My Phone.

An open-source competitor to all of these is Funambol. The startup evaluated all of the syncing services and scored them based on criteria such as how many kinds of data each one supports, cost, usability, and number of supported devices. (Full study embedded at bottom of post). It came up with a score for each out of a maximum of 40. Naturally enough, Funambol scored the highest, but if you throw that out you end up with the list below (with accompanying scores).